Secret Voices by Sarah Gristwood

A captivating collection of extracts from women’s diaries, looking back over four centuries to discover how women’s experience – of men and children, sex and shopping, work and the natural world – has changed down the years. And, of course, how it hasn’t.

In this fascinating anthology, with a selection of entries for every day of the year, you’ll find Lady Anne Clifford in the seventeenth century and Loran Hurscot in the twentieth both stoically recording the demands of an unreasonable husband; Joan Wyndham and Anne Frank (at much the same time, but in wildly different settings) describing their first experiences with sex; and Anne Lister in the eighteenth-century north of England exploring her love affairs with women alongside Alice Walker in twentieth-century California.

Queen Victoria laments the loss of her husband; housewife Nella Last finds that World War II has given her an unexpected independence from hers. Educationalist Sylvia Ashton-Warner in modern New Zealand asks how to juggle work and family; Canadian artist Emily Carr how to manage her work and her identity. Mary Shelley records the death of her baby in half a line; Anne Morrow Lindberg heartbreakingly chronicles the weeks after the kidnap and murder of her baby son.

From Barbara Pym purchasing daring lingerie and Virginia Woolf relishing her new haircut to Sylvia Plath chronicling her ups and her downs and a stoical Amelia Stewart Knight on the pioneer trail, this book contains a rich mix of incredibly well-known diarists and more obscure ones, and often the voices echoing down the centuries sound eerily familiar today.

A fascinating and important collection of extracts from women’s diaries through the centuries, including such iconic voices as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Frank, with a selection of pieces for every day of the year.

About the Author: Sarah Gristwood is a best-selling biographer, former film journalist, and commentator on royal affairs. She has appeared in most of the UK’s leading newspapers and magazines. She wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth-century story Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah was one of the team providing Radio 4’s live coverage of the royal wedding. She is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honorary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces. She is the author of The Story of Beatrix Potter and Game of Queens: The Women Who Made the 16th Century.

29 Feb 2024
 

Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries by Sarah Gristwood ISBN 9781849948159